Speaking at Prime Minister's Questions, Mr Cameron appeared to seek a consensus on boosting airport capacity in the south east and said he would be revealing more details later this week.

He told the Commons:

Let me be very frank about this: very large infrastructure projects are extremely difficult for individual governments to take and to deliver.

What we need to do is build a process that hopefully has cross-party support so we can look carefully at this issue and deliver changes that will address the problems of capacity we will have in future years and address the issue of the hub status of the UK.

I'm hoping to make an announcement about this over the coming days...I think it's important we work across party lines because this won't happen unless parties sign up to a process they can deliver.